Paris can stay in bed

Simon Le Ruez

3 October – 2 November 2019

Simon Le Ruez, Between Brooklyn and the Bronx (Detail), 2019, hand blown glass, wood, cement, steel, acrylic and household paint, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Colin Davison

For his fourth solo exhibition at Vane Simon Le Ruez presents a body of work which continues to explore his interests in territory, transparency, fragility and transition, and which takes his fascination with making, colour and material combination to new and unexpected levels.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a line in Leo Carax’s 1991 film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge). With grim radiance, the film charts the story of two fractured individuals discovering each other on Paris’ oldest bridge, upon which themes of abandonment, freedom, desire and redemption are played out with the city as a backdrop. Le Ruez’s new work aligns itself with these multifaceted and fragmented themes. Potent relationships are key to the experience of his work and whilst these may be explored through form, material and structure, a deeper, more complex introspection permanently resides.

Simon Le Ruez, ‘Paris can stay in bed’, 2019, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison

Simon Le Ruez, L’amour l’après-midi (detail), 2019, hand blown glass, wood, steel, cement, moulded plastic, enamel and acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Photo: Colin Davison

Simon Le Ruez, ‘Paris can stay in bed’, 2019, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison

Simon Le Ruez, The Monk, 2019, hand blown glass, wood, moulded plastic, cellophane, enamel, acrylic and household paint, thread, tape, pompoms, dimensions variable. Photo: Colin Davison

Hand blown glass forms permeate the artist’s new work injecting refinement; exquisite digressions and qualities of tension. Like a precarious, revealed interior of communal space within an apartment building, the work Between Brooklyn and the Bronx (2019), hosts a fevered collection of objects and arrangements, which might allude to misfit characters or inhabitants. A hierarchy is at play, with the pinnacle of the piece reserved for a sweeping glass form, which sits there surveying and emanating with all the will and secrecy of a silent concierge. High Holy Days (2019) is a work that takes this sense of refinement further. Two glass forms lay ceremoniously alone on a marble platform, one penetrating the other with a charge of illicit joy. Yet one may wonder if it is a mutual act of celebration or something altogether untoward. Possible conflicting relationships and a sense of brooding are further explored in The Monk (2019), where a bright yet nostalgically coloured structure plays host to, among other things, a muted grey vertical board and a protruding bulbous glass form.

With this exhibition Le Ruez takes the viewer on a celebratory journey full of twists and tangents, crossings and meeting points, conjuring both the immediacy of the here and now and the sense that elsewhere is never far away.


Take a video tour of the exhibition


 

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2019Paul Stone